Hadley Freeman, who left the Guardian when it became clear that her gender-critical views weren't welcome and will now be writing for the Times, was interviewed on the BBC's Woman's Hour yesterday. The Telegraph has the details:
A former Guardian journalist has accused the newspaper of censoring her views on women’s rights, claiming an “atmosphere of fear” governs its coverage of trans issues.
Hadley Freeman claimed she was barred from interviewing JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova, both of whom have expressed gender-critical views.
Meanwhile, the newspaper ran “glowing profiles of trans activists” such as Munroe Bergdorf, Paris Lees and Freddy McConnell, Freeman said.
She quit The Guardian earlier this year after editors said she could not follow up the The Telegraph’s investigation into Mermaids, a trans charity.
Freeman said she had also learned that a group named All About Trans visited the Guardian and, in her absence, held up some of her writing as examples of transphobia.
“I was told I wasn’t to write about gender, and that actually women shouldn’t write about gender, and suddenly things became very tricky for me,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
The journalist said she was “specifically told by upper management that I wasn’t allowed to write about gender stuff, and others weren’t either”.
She added: “I know of multiple reporters who asked if they could interview [gender-critical campaigners] Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey … I asked about interviewing JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova, and we were all told ‘no’.”
Freeman said managers told her women should not write about gender “because it gets too much of a kickback on social media [and] it should be done by the male specialist reporters, such as health reporters”.
She added that she had been in “a very happy long-term marriage” with The Guardian for her first 15 years there, but “about seven years ago that particular partner started to become a conspiracy theorist, unrecognisable to me, and it just got to a point where I couldn’t take any more”.
Freeman said: “There did suddenly become this atmosphere of real fear at the paper,” recalling one meeting in which staff discussed a Guardian editorial stating that feminists were entitled to express doubts about gender self-identification.
“I was defending the editorial and various people, whom I considered friends, were being quite personally abusive and saying it was transphobic, like people saying a gay teacher shouldn’t teach children,” she claimed.
“I understand it’s a subject that gets very heated. I’ve tried to be very calm and measured and look at both sides of it. And what you get from the other side, if you’re just trying to defend what is literally the law in this country, is to be told you’re killing children, you’re a bigot – this very violent way of talking.
“I can take that – what I don’t understand is why upper management is scared to deal with that. It’s not just The Guardian. This has happened at a lot of progressive places, this feeling of fear that we can’t stand up against some of the claims that gender activists make.”
That's it in a nutshell. Management in places like the Guardian may not necessarily believe all the gender woo, but they're scared. They're in thrall to the activists. One cry of "transphobe" and they're hiding uuder their desks.
Suzanne Moore was there first - forced out of the Guardian a couple of years back. She now writes for the Telegraph:
The wheels have been coming off the bus of so-called “gender ideology" for some time, though if you only read certain newspapers, saw certain comedians or watched only the BBC you would scarcely know that. Censorship is too strong a word to use about how the subject of trans rights are covered. It is more that any conflict with women's rights are dismissed, ignored or deemed “transphobic”.
If I declared myself a man tomorrow, had my breasts removed and an unfeasible phallus fashioned out of flesh from my arm, I would still be called transphobic. The invisible committee of the righteous has decided that my standing up for women and my belief in biology makes me so. This is why I left my former paper - so I could write as I wish. This is why my former colleague Hadley Freeman has also left, after spending her adult life there. Yesterday, she gave a compelling interview on Woman’s Hour in which she talked about the subjects she was not allowed to write about, such as anti-Semitism and the trans issue.
Freeman, who I hardly knew at the time, stood up for me when 330 staff wrote a virtue-signalling letter wanting to stop “transphobia” at The Guardian. In the column that set them off, I had asked about the huge uptick in the number of teenage girls (often autistic, with eating disorders and a history of self-harming) wanting to transition. Freeman had the guts to speak publicly about what she thought was right.
Many other colleagues did and still do send messages of support. Privately. My respect for them diminishes by the day. Alongside these messages, I get threats and am told that I am responsible for the “genocide” of trans people. Facts don’t matter. There were, in actuality, no trans people murdered in Britain last year. There were, however, between two and three women killed every week.
What I feel most upset about is the absolute dereliction of basic journalism by the Left-wing media. The first lie is that there is no conflict between trans rights and women's rights, and no harm ever caused by self-identification. In truth, there is a conflict - and it is ripping apart the SNP, whose leader, Nicola Sturgeon, backs a Bill that would make it easier for people to legally change gender without a medical diagnosis. The issue has also divided the Greens and, in effect, ended the Women's Equality Party. In private, half of Labour do not think that women can have a penis; they just won’t say it publicly.
The un-reporting of truth by the so-called Left is vomit inducing. For years, we have known about Mermaids. Susie Green, until last week its CEO, was hiding in plain sight, boasting of having her child castrated at 16.
For years, whistleblowers had been telling us what was going on at London’s Tavistock Centre: the prescribing of cross-sex hormones (a treatment to help people transition from their biological gender to their desired gender) after three 50-minute sessions. Detransitioners were speaking out. Neither Hadley nor I were allowed to write about this.
Stonewall had successfully captured every organisation and rewarded it for being “trans inclusive.” ...
Worse than all this, though, is the self-censorship that Chimanda Ngozi Adiche spoke of in her Reith lecture last week - we have a generation who, even if they can think critically, are afraid of becoming outcasts from their tribe. This outcast can only say: “Liberate yourself, it’s glorious”. In the end, it is a matter of principle over popularity.
“Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.” wrote Marguerite Duras. Well, the good ones are. But don’t tell The Guardian that. Cowardice is free, but facts are sacred.
Clever. If you don't know, the Guardian byline is "comment is free, but facts are sacred".
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